Dating App Desti Styles Itself After TikTok with Focus on Local Venues

New dating app Desti puts TikTok-style videos front and center, with a focus on local places to meet up IRL.

Desti is short for “destination,” and the app gives users a chance to match with others based on preferred date destinations. When scrolling through the app, users see videos of venues with the poster’s profile in the corner, according to Tech Crunch.

“We decided to bet on short-form video being the future,” Nick Dominguez, COO and lead designer/developer of Desti said in an interview with TechCrunch.

In July the company raised $1 million in a $5 million valuation cap. When it launched, Desti had 500 users in the first hour, over 2,000 downloads and 5,000 messages in the first day, according to Tech Crunch. The service is currently only available in Austin, Texas.

The dating app teaser Tech Crunch shared is from Desti’s Instagram post. It shows some in-house created video of a local outdoor bar with a text prompt added at the top: “My toxic trait is…thinking I’ll come here for just one drink.” The poster’s profile is in the bottom left corner with a photo, name and age visible.

The app doesn’t have a “like” feature; if you want to connect with a potential match you have to strike up a conversation. When you send a message to someone over the app, they have the choice to accept and reply or reject it. Plus, users can only message one at a time, so they must pass or respond to move to the next video. 

Examples of Destination videos on Desti

When users set up a profile, they must pick three “destis” from categories like Breweries, Rooftops, Live Music, Food Trucks, Dog Dates for example, according to Tech Crunch. In addition to “my toxic trait is…” there are hundreds of prompts to choose from, such as “someone teach me…” or “The CDC recommends…” or a more generic “Tonight we should…”

Users can also upload up to four photos.

Desti joins other TikTok-style dating apps aimed at Gen Z users, like Snack which allows users to create their own short videos to a feed and swipe on other videos to match. Desti said it wanted to build a “more robust” Discovery feature to let users find events, restaurants, and other venues. The company is also working on a subscription plan and paid features that will allow users to send more than 12 messages per day (the current limit).

“Dating online and attempting to initiate conversations with people you don’t know is inherently awkward,” the company said in the launch announcement. “Being able to see that someone also likes one of your favorite coffee shops or frequents one of you and your friend’s favorite patio bars helps make them feel like less of a stranger. It helps make the interaction feel more natural like it may be someone you would naturally run into.”

Desti told Tech Crunch that it is looking into offering background checks and photo authentication features in the future.